Tips For Mac

I use Front Row on my Mac every so often. Its a cool way to navigate various Music and Movie files while I’m in bed. The other day I was digging into the source files and folder to see if I could find anything interesting. Most of the files are standard for a Mac app. However I soon came to realize that the various different areas in Front Row, Movies, Music, TV etc are actually plugins. I then wondered if you could remove the to make the screen smaller and simpler, since I never use the TV option. Turns out you can.

Today’s handy hint was supplied by my friend and I just had to share it with you. As you may know the Trash folder exists in your dock. This is quite a useful place. You can actually place a link to your Trash folder in the sidebar, which I find is a handy place to work from. This tip is a bit long winded, ands its not a simple solution. However the results are quite useful.

Networks are a fickle thing. Every so often your network, which ever method you are using, will just suddenly stop. This can be a right pain and usually happens right before you have to buy something off ebay, at that crucial time. This guide will hopefully enable new users (as well as those pro’s) to troubleshoot your own network before you have to phone a techie friend or a company. This guide is designed to be followed one after another, although you can skip to any point. I recommend you read the Anatomy Of Network Preferences, before you begin.

Every so often your Mac will have generate minor problems. For instance it may replace a file type icon with a different icon, it may also get confused with your open with,right click menu. This is mostly due to your Mac writing over file with wrong information or the same information twice. This is kind of annoying, but it can easily be rectified. The most common method, and the one explain in this post, is to rebuild the launchservices database. This takes a Terminal command (like most commands), to clear the database and rebuild it with the correct information.

This was a question asked by Rob a couple of days ago. He wanted to know if there was a way to disable the pop up message, which appears when you close a Terminal window. This message usually pops up when you have a Unix program such as ssh running and it warns you when you are about to close it. Its quite useful if you tend to close windows a lot but for Unix power users it can get in the way.

Today’s post idea was originally submitted by Chris, its a rather cool trick he accidentally found when adding new mailboxes into Mail. If you ever use folders it can be a bit of a pain to add sub-folders. This trick will do both, at the same time. Rather cool if you ask me. This trick may also work in other applications, I have yet to try it out.

This tip comes from a request by Alec, after a bit of fiddling and looking for workarounds I have found a solution on how to mute individual applications. This is quite useful if you have a noisy web browser or application that you want to mute, which doesn’t have its own volume control.

I like my Terminal tricks, they are really handy. I don’t think I have mentioned this quick tip before. I have searched my database and no tips have turned up. This little Terminal tip will disable any icons in you dock from bouncing. If you find them annoying there is a simple command which enables you to turn the animation off.

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About

I'm James, and I have been a Mac user for years. Over this time I have found loads of tips and tricks which have helped me get the most out of my Mac, so I decided to share them with you all. For more info see my about page.

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